Sunday 25 July 2010 09.25 EDT
First published on Sunday 25 July 2010 09.25 EDT

Those of us who yearned for more action and excitement at Comic-Con after a drab Friday may have ended yesterday thinking that we should be careful what we wish for. Real violence, real blood, came to Hall H at the San Diego Convention Centre on Saturday afternoon when a fan was rumoured to have been stabbed in the eye with a pen during the presentation for Resident Evil: Afterlife. (Some hours later, the assault-by-ballpoint transpired to have resulted in a mere scratched eyelid.)

Such events are an anomaly. Nerds are by nature a gentle people. They wouldn't jostle a jawa. That said, the decaying, blood-spattered zombie look is by far the most highly favoured costume. I should say that some of those zombies are promoting The Walking Dead, a new US television series from Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist). The show's star, and the latest Brit to be staking his Equity membership on following Hugh Laurie and Tim Roth to primetime fame, is Andrew Lincoln, whose fortunes since BBC2's This Life have represented a kind of extended Night of the Living Dead; no matter how much crap he appears in, his career simply won't lie down and die.

The undead hordes responded heartily to a panel hailing Brian Michael Bendis, the no-shit Marvel writer whose every throwaway, tough-guy line was greeted with audible glee. The bullet-headed Bendis was described in the introduction as "the go-to guy for blowing things up and starting all over again" and "probably the most popular writer working in comics today." He can pass for Michael Chiklis from The Shield, which is to say that he looks like he could break your leg just by wanting to, and that he has ample space in his bathroom cabinet where the rest of us keep our hair products.

The most surreal moment came when Jeph Loeb, the newly-appointed head of TV at Marvel, stood up in the audience and took the mic during the Q&A section. "I'm here to put you on the spot," he told an amused Bendis, before publicly asking him to co-write and co-produce a new animated series, The Ultimate Spider-Man. The deal sealed in public, Loeb hotfooted it out of there, leaving us wondering: PR stunt or blue-sky thinking? Either way, he got his man.

With the writer's immediate future taken care of thanks to Loeb, Bendis's admirers wanted to know about the past. A fan brought up the predominance of female characters in Bendis's work, such as the recent Scarlet, and asked if he was familiar with Jung. "He did Silver Surfer, right?," Bendis shot back, before deciding that the emphatic female presence could be explained by a childhood spent with his single mother, as well as by his domestic bliss ("My house is filled with strong women").

He spoke compellingly about the importance of research in his work, and especially in the Spider-Man Clone saga. "When I was writing that, I said, 'I'm gonna learn how to make a clone.' I researched cloning for a year and none of it made it into the book. But I felt empowered as a writer. You have to do it, because someone out there will know if you don't, and your mistakes will be infuriating and embarrassing."

The other sort of research he favours goes by the technical name "eavesdropping". "I train myself to listen to people, the way they talk. If you see me walking round with headphones on that's so people will feel they can talk around me. My wife's amazed when we're in a restaurant because I can hear a couple arguing two booths away. I'll be noting it all down."

After expressing disapproval toward the attitude of one fellow writer ("You don't wanna Alan-Moore-it-up on the internet – 'Oh, everyone sucks but me!'"), Bendis lavished praise on his favourite scribes: Woody Allen, Richard Price, Aaron Sorkin and especially David Mamet. "I found more truth in Mamet's books about theatre, more truth relating to my life in comics, than anything I've come across. I talked to him for the first time a few months ago, and it was amazing to tell him how much he means to me."

His parting tip was that we should all download Sorkin's screenplay for David Fincher's forthcoming "story of Facebook" movie, The Social Network. "Best script I've ever read, it's so fucking great! It's going to win an Oscar, I guarantee it." You heard it here first.

There was another stimulating comic-book panel in the shape of International Comics and Graphic Novels, which also acted as a minor riposte to Comic-Con's Anglo-American bias (the convention's most glaring shortcoming). Italy's Milo Manara (Click!) eloquently expressed the hope that his work will transcend language and cultural specifics.

"If you're lucky enough to have an international audience," he said, "that's a stroke of luck bigger than winning the lottery. You just do what's inside, and that will be universal. Who you are goes beyond culture." Moto Haggio (Drunken Dreams) expressed amazement that her graphic novels had travelled beyond Japan. "I was setting my work in a make-believe America, or a make-believe Germany," she said, "and if I'd known some day people in those countries would read them, I would've been so embarrassed that they would never have been written."

But it is films, and US films at that, which continue to dominate Comic-Con. The crowd's reaction to Jon Favreau (Iron Man) introducing his film Cowboys & Aliens would have been ecstatic even if he hadn't wheeled on his stars, Daniel Craig and the rarely-seen-in-public Harrison Ford. The latter looked bewildered as he shuffled on stage in handcuffs escorted by two police officers (an off-key reference to the afternoon's violence?) None of which quite allayed the impression that the movie resembles Wild, Wild West played straight. Not that Wild, Wild West was funny, but you get the gist.

Paul, a road movie about two nerds who meet a foul-mouthed ET-lookalike alien, was greeted almost as enthusiastically; the film's writing/acting team, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, got the sort of welcome usually reserved for local boys made good. They had earned the crowd's affection many times over from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but took out an extra insurance policy by setting part of Paul at Comic-Con itself. The sound of the audience whooping and cheering the mirror-image of their world on screen was half-touching, half-solipsistic. Frost pointed out that the convention centre in the film is a replica built in New Mexico. "We wanted to shoot here last year," he said, "but in the words of the San Diego fire marshal: 'No fucking way.'"